News,Sports,Events,Entertainment,Technology,Health,Inspiration,Fashion and Gossip!

11.10.12

Lost diaries help solve "young Mona Lisa" mystery

A package of
diaries said to have been posted to the United States from Britain in the 1960s
could provide a vital clue to the origin of a controversial portrait presented
in Geneva last month as Leonardo da Vinci's original "Mona Lisa."

But in a twist
typical of the intrigue-prone world of art, the diaries -- notes by early 20th
century British connoisseur and collector Hugh Blaker -- disappeared and the
Washington address they were sent to seems never to have existed.

"Those papers
could well provide the key to pushing back the provenance of this version of
the 'Mona Lisa' by at least 150 years," Robert Meyrick, an academic and
expert on the largely forgotten Blaker.

And, of course, to
helping establish if the so-called "Isleworth" variant of the world's
most famous painting in the Paris Louvre could indeed be an earlier -- and
priceless -- portrayal by Leonardo of the enigmatic, smiling lady.

Blaker, an
unsuccessful painter who as a museum curator and dealer had a reputation for
recognizing lost Old Masters, found and bought the "younger Mona
Lisa" in 1913 -- in, he later said, a nobleman's country house in Somerset
in western England.

Sure it was a real
Leonardo, he kept it at his home in the London suburb of Isleworth -- giving it
its informal identity tag -- until it passed to his sister Jane on his death in
1936.

But Blaker told no
one the name of the country house or of the seller. Meyrick, who was invited to
the Geneva presentation to talk about the bachelor connoisseur, is keen to
solve that mystery for a biography he plans to write.

"I think he
must have put the details in his diaries," he said in an e-mail message
this month from Aberystwyth University in Wales where he is Head of the School
of Art.

"But the very
brief published extracts we have give no clue. If we have that knowledge, we
should be able to trace how it came into the Somerset family's possession, and
where."

GRAND TOUR
PURCHASE?

Meyrick theorizes
that it could have been picked up by an 18th century member of the family
during one of the Grand Tours across Europe undertaken by young English nobles.
Many great works of European art came to Britain that way.

After Jane Blaker
died in 1947, the painting was eventually purchased by an international art
dealer and then lay for nearly 40 years in Swiss bank vaults until last month's
Geneva presentation by a Zurich-based "Mona Lisa Foundation."

At that session,
Italian Leonardo specialist Alessandro Vezzosi praised its quality but held
back from endorsing the foundation's claim that it is the work of Leonardo, who
died in 1519. For that, much more work was needed, said Vezzosi.

Some experts who
were not present like British professor Martin Kemp of Oxford University,
scoffed at it as a poor copy -- although, as foundation member Stanley Feldman
noted, Kemp had never actually seen the portrait.

"The
controversy underlines the importance of the diaries," says Meyrick.

With other papers
and an unpublished novel, they passed after the death of Blaker -- whose keen
eye had brought the scorned Italian artist Amadeo Modigliani to the British art
public in the 1920s -- to his painter friend Murray Urquhart.

Before he died in
1972 Urquhart, whose son Brian was a key figure in the United Nations in the
1970s and 80s, said he had sent Blaker's notes from before 1931 to a researcher
named Charles Woods who had written asking to see them.

According to
Urquhart's account, he posted them to Woods at 116 1/2 (Eds: correct) Maryland
Drive, Washington DC -- but heard nothing more. "All I can establish is
that there is no such address, and probably never was," says Meyrick.

There is also no
trace of Woods.

But in 2010, in
response to a standing appeal on his website (www.robertmeyrick.co.uk), Meyrick
was sent Blaker's diaries for the last five years of his life by a family who
found them years before in a junk shop in Gravesend, east of London.